Overheard: Word of the Day

The replacement of vigorous outdoor activities by sedentary, indoor videophilia has far-reaching consequences for physical and mental health, especially in children. Videophilia has been shown to be a cause of obesity, lack of socialization, attention disorders and poor academic performance.

Lots of press about a study funded by The Nature Conservancy. The study looked at visits to national and state parks as well as numbers of hunting and fishing licenses. Their conclusion? Video games and the Internet are responsible for decreased numbers. I’m wondering: Did they factor in the price of gas or park admission fees?

Skulltrail. We’re not sure who thinks up these names. It brings to mind visions of worlds where dark mages do battle with Paladins for world domination. Maybe that’s what Intel had in mind when they came up with the name.

In reality, Skulltrail is more of a workaholic engineer, devoted to getting the most done in the least amount of time. Skulltrail is a little short on the people skills, a little too loud, but like the geeky programmer who can write ten times as much code as his peers, Skulltrail gets the job done.

When you get down to brass tacks, Skulltrail is an engineering workstation with some added chrome to be a pretty high-end gaming system. But its primary mission in life is to bring eight cores to bear on tough computational problems.

This time the rumors were true: Microsoft has made a $44.6 billion, $31 per share bid for Yahoo… Microsoft believes that the tie-up will give the companies needed scale in the online advertising space and is expecting at least $1 billion in synergies for the combined company.

This also adds urgency to another possible combo: Google-AOL. Google already owns a five percent stake in AOL and a full acquisition would aid Google on the advertising side as well as with traction and traffic in portal areas it has yet to conquer such as finance and sports.

This has the potential to be the first serious threat Google has had to their online advertising business and the first time the battle cry “antitrust” has been sounded.

Java is a programming language expressly designed for use in the distributed environment of the Internet. It was designed to have the “look and feel” of the C++ language, but it is simpler to use than C++.

About This Blog

Overheard in the tech blogosphere is like an impressionist painting about information technology. Close up, it’s just a bunch of colorful quotes. Take a step back and look at all the posts together — and you begin to see a picture.